MY COMMUNITY BOARD

An audio-visual archival resource focusing on radical activism around Australia, particularly during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (although resources are not restricted exclusively to this time period).

The archive recovers "lost" and rare independent Australian documentaries (also vérité footage of historical significance) in order to preserve these films, videos and audio for posterity before they reach end of life and disappear permanently.

The focus is on visual/aural material.....the archive currently has 204 film streams and 91 audio streams.

There is a reason we call each other "comrades" and not "friends" on the Memefest network.

Here a new book From Jodi Dean: ComradeAn Essay on Political Belonging

When people say “comrade”, they change the world

In the twentieth-century millions of people across the globe addressed each other as “comrade”. Now, it’s more common to hear talk of “allies” on the left than it is of comrades. In Comrade, Jodi Dean insists that this shift exemplifies the key problem with the contemporary left: the substitution of political identity for a relation of political belonging that must be built, sustained, and defended.

In Comrade, Dean offers a theory of the comrade. Comrades are equals on the same side of a political struggle. Voluntarily coming together in the struggle for justice, their relationship is characterised by discipline, joy, courage, and enthusiasm. Considering the generic egalitarianism of the comrade in light of differences of race and gender, Dean draws from an array of historical and literary examples such as Harry Haywood, C.L.R James, Alexandra Kollontai, and Doris Lessing. She argues that if we are to be a left at all, we have to be comrades.

"During the introduction of a recent speech by Donald Trump at Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit, someone — reportedly by accident and has since been fired from Turning Point — pasted into the slides a 2016 faux seal created by Charles Leazott that features an eagle holding wads of cash and golf clubs with a ribbon that says, in Spanish, “45 is a Puppet”. Score one for the resistance."

"Keeping the social network sites small is essential for customization that will meet everyone's needs. Kazemi doesn't suggest going over 100 users. Smaller communities are easier to manage both technically and socially, but it also creates an intimacy where it's possible to know everyone in the group, creating a truly private, curated space. "

Donald Weber writes about photography as a discipline, profession and practice, which still has a long journey to make for to be able to think the conditions of its own production. This work is part of a larger body of work Donald and I are developing, one day it will be a book. A next text related to the ideas Donald is talking about here is in the making. Highly recommended reading!

There is several reasons I am posting this. First, it is time to bring this wonderful text, the original text by Mark Dery, which first theorized the term Culture Jamming - in fact Dery has coined the term- to you.

So here is: Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs

I find the concept of Culture jamming still very useful, although the practice of CJ was in the last two decades abused, coopted, critiqued for being just an empty fashion etc. I always thought that in order to do it well, Culture Jamming needs superb understanding of communication, design and art in relation to meaning making in our media, well in the world.

Now, the media has changed and changed again, and the question is how is Culture jamming useful in the current social media, surveillance driven media sphere. But it is and even if we engage just in the visual graphic part, it can do "something".

So what can it do today, I am asking you? And this is what I aim to start figuring out more with my master of communication design students here at RMIT. As part of a set of semiotic strategies, named Re:Coding we will look into that. But I would need your help- what are good examples of CJ, what are good CURRENT examples of CJ? How would you run a project on CJ with students?

Here is a video of one that I love from our friend Vladimir Turner, and the whole project is here:

What great memories! Culture jamming 2002, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Perhaps the first culture jamming action in Slovenia- in a night action we jammed a national campaign on the importance of brands and branding. Big Slovenian brands had billboards all over in order to promote the value of brands and the importance of buying well known brands.

We used a stencil and jammed billboards on major crossroads or other prominent locations. This was in the middle of the process for the first Memefest and in no minor way we were influenced by the Culture Jamming concepts and culture in thinking about our first festival. Especially No Logo by Naomi Klein and the Adbusters magazine were important at that time.

This is such a cool text: 101 Ways to Play With the Mainstream, Culture Jamming as subversive recreation, by Tom Liacas.

Written at the height of the popularity of Culture jamming it is highly relevant as it speaks from within the very cultures that created the phenomenon. Still now, CJ is a widely used practice and in my opinion should be taught, perhaps under the banner "Re-Coding" to students. To be a good Jammer means to be a super good communicator/ designer/ media manipulator. Its much more difficult that it seams, but most of all, it really is fun.Check it out, I have given it to read to some of my students for their research project in the masters of communication design.

Abstract: Risk in education in the creative field of communication design is usually seen in connection with creativity as subjective expression and innovation as desired impact. This article positions risk in relation to the political in design education. It puts forward the argument that a particular type of risk-taking in education can work towards shifting design from a position of a service-providing activity towards a more emancipated practice, which would not comply with the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. To counter the current state of compliance this article suggests a three-level model of extradisciplinary risk-taking as institutional critique. The case of Memefest and Design Futures is discussed. Theoretical analysis is combined with (auto) ethnography and qualitative research.

If you cant access the paper online because your institution cant afford to pay for the journal subscription or because you are not an academic and cant access this or for what ever reason write to me: oliver AT memefest.org

You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook.Wall Street Journal testing reveals how the social-media giant collects a wide range of private data from developers; ‘This is a big mess’

"The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps often send the data without any prominent or specific disclosure, the testing showed."

You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook.Wall Street Journal testing reveals how the social-media giant collects a wide range of private data from developers; ‘This is a big mess’

"The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps often send the data without any prominent or specific disclosure, the testing showed."

We should talk about it comrade. Our current web site is designed for computers and not smart phones. Slow media, not instant. We plan to do some improvements, but of course we can't compete with the technology of Facebook. Yes, a Memefest app would be great. But I am not sure how we could make this as we don't have the money. Do you have any ideas how could we approach this?

"The heavy atoms in cameras will continue to be replaced with bits of weightless software, shrinking them down to microscopic dots scanning the environment 24 hours a day. The mirrorworld will be a world governed by light rays zipping around, coming into cameras, leaving displays, entering eyes, a never-­ending stream of photons painting forms that we walk through and visible ghosts that we touch. The laws of light will govern what is possible.

New technologies bestow new superpowers. We gained super speed with jet planes, super healing powers with antibiotics, super hearing with the radio. The mirrorworld promises super vision. We’ll have a type of x-ray vision able to see into objects via their virtual ghosts, exploding them into constituent parts, able to untangle their circuits visually. Just as past generations gained textual literacy in school, learning how to master the written word, from alphabets to indexes, the next generation will master visual literacy. A properly educated person will be able to create a 3D image inside of a 3D landscape nearly as fast as one can type today. They will know how to search all videos ever made for the visual idea they have in their head, without needing words. The complexities of color and the rules of perspective will be commonly understood, like the rules of grammar. It will be the Photonic Era."

Listen to the new episode of Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, here in conversation with Geert Lovink.

Playing for Team Human today: media activist and scholar Geert Lovink. Geert will be helping us see how an understanding of the political economy is not enough. We have to reacquaint ourselves with the experiential layer of our humanity and even reclaim our sadness to counter the stultifying effects of platform capitalism. Today, when our sources of information are intimately intertwined with our social lives, it’s not as simple as just “going offline.” How can we overcome the anti-human agendas embedded in our technology?

Today’s show reaches back to the origins of what became known as “tactical media” — using interactive media to promote the human agenda. Geert makes the case for reawakening this sensibility. You can learn more about Geert at networkedcultures.org and discover his forthcoming book Sad By Design: On Platform Nihilism.

"In the latest study measuring the effects of social media on a person’s life, researchers at New York University and Stanford University found that deactivating Facebook for just four weeks could alter people’s behavior and state of mind. The study found that temporarily quitting Facebook led people to spend more time offline, watching TV and socializing with family and friends; reduced their knowledge of current events and polarization of policy views; and provoked a small but significant improvement in people’s self-reported happiness and satisfaction with their lives.

What’s more, the researchers found that the deactivation freed up on average an hour per day for participants. And the people who took a break from Facebook continued to use the platform less often, even after the experiment ended.

“Our study offers the largest-scale experimental evidence available to date on the way Facebook affects a range of individual and social welfare measures,” the researchers wrote. "

We should talk about it comrade. Our current web site is designed for computers and not smart phones. Slow media, not instant. We plan to do some improvements, but of course we can't compete with the technology of Facebook. Yes, a Memefest app would be great. But I am not sure how we could make this as we don't have the money. Do you have any ideas how could we approach this?

'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism

Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is a chilling exposé of the business model that underpins the digital world. Observer tech columnist John Naughton explains the importance of Zuboff’s work and asks the author 10 key questions

While classical melancholy was defined by isolation and introspection, today’s tristesse plays out amidst busy social media interactions. Geert Lovink on ‘technological sadness’ – the default mental state of the online billions.